Tag Archives: Stockholm

Hey peeps! Some of you may know and some may not, but as a student in Sweden we can have tons of discounts on many things, one of them is on food! But why food and discounts are the subject from this post today? Well, using hard data from the Swedish Environment Protection Agency, Swedes generated in 2012 around 127 kg/person of food waste.

Panini Internazionale, offers a variety of salads, paninis, wraps and other things extremely delicious! (well, I do like the food here). The good part is that not only you can find their offer quite tasty, but that they have some pretty good and healthy meals too… sad part, it is not so friendly for a low-budget student; I’m taking about 100 SEK salads, for example…

BUT WAIT!!! DON’T GO!!!! There’s a good part also… as a student… in the last hour before closing, all stores offer all of their products already displayed with a 70% discount! YES 70% DISCOUNT showing your student id (phone or card)!

With this strategy food that could have ended up as waste, now ends up on your table ready to be eaten! Let’s remember that there’s still a fight against world hunger so let’s be aware of what we eat and how much we can actually eat. Prevention is always the best way to cut our waste! Here some pics of what I bought today for 57 SEK (normal price 190 SEK).

Do you believe in Karma? I do! And it’s fantastic! No peeps, I’m not talking about the consequences the universe will be throwing at you for cheating on your bf/gf, I’m talking about Karma, Swedish app that helps to reduce the food being wasted. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO):

Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted.

But whats the magic part with this app? By using karma, you’ll get the chance to be in contact with restaurants, bakeries, and other food stores that will offer you huge discounts at an specific time and place of the day for their surplus of food, saving significant amounts of products going to the trash (e.g. sandwiches, muffins, cakes, etc). Here is a screen capture of how the pages looks 😀

Unfortunately, Karma comes with a price; the price of having a Swedish bank account, thus you must have also a personal number (really complicated system in here, right?). Why? Cause the app is only in the Swedish app store (at least for iPhone). Feeling wild? Ask a Swedish friend to lend his/her credit card! Haha tell them is for a good cause!

Do you have any app like this in your country? Remember to follow and comment! 😀

Sustainable development is not only about knowing in which can your trash goes, it goes way deeper than that. It’s about equality, health, poverty and so many other facts that policy makers must take into consideration to have a proper leadership. That’s why the aim of this post is to present to you how Sweden is one of the top leaders following UN’s 17 Sustainable Goals 2015-2030. Do you know them by heart? Well, here they are…

1. No Poverty

0.09 is Sweden’s ratio when it comes to poverty as reported by the OECD (2014).

2. Zero Hunger

Less than 3.5% is the amount of Swedish people at risk of not having enough money to buy a proper meal every second day as reported by Eurostat (2016).

3. Good Health and Well-being

As of 2015, 82.5 years of life expectancy at birth in Sweden. One of the top 5 countries in the field.

4. Quality Education

Sweden comes at 4th place when it comes to USD/Student ratio on spending money for eduction.

Stockholmers, what a great spectacle we had last night! Incredible nature’s show right above us, green bright lights dancing over our heads thanks to solar’s winds disrupting Earth’s magnetosphere. This amazing spectacle that people seek mostly by traveling northern Sweden paying a significant amount of money just to see what we had here for free! Yesterday! HERE IN STOCKHOLM!… Oh wait, you didn’t see the northern lights? It was too bright in hype Södermalm? Well, then say thank you to what scientist call “Light Pollution” and enjoy these 2 pics from IG users living in Lappis, northern Stockholm.

As many of you, me and my roomies were unable to actually see the lights last night (we live in beautiful Älvsjö, southern Södermalm). The bright illumination surrounding us, whether it was from our own building or the street, didn’t let us see this incredible phenomena. So light pollution is the one to blame. As presented in the “Dark Sky Organization”, this type of pollution is the result of our industrialized civilization and is composed by:

According to the 2016 groundbreaking “World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness,” 80 percent of the world’s population lives under skyglow. In the United States and Europe 99 percent of the public can’t experience a natural night!

Want to know more about how lamps block natural light? Click here. Remember that unnecessary lamps don’t only stop us to seeing amazing starry nights, but they consume energy 🙁

Limits. We know about speed limits, spending money limits, and even our parents’ patience limits; but how many of you have heard about Earth’s Environmental Limits? I’m pretty sure that you have heard at least 1 of the 9 planetary limits (or better called planetary boundaries), Climate Change! But what about the other 8? As a matter of fact (maybe by my own ignorance or the fact that they are quite new), before coming to Sweden I had never heard before the term “Planetary Boundaries”.

Everything started with one TED talk from Johan Röckstrom, internationally recognized Swedish scientist, where he introduced for the first time the 9 planetary boundaries. As presented in the image below, you can find our limitations for environmental stability and well-being. Inside the blue circle we are operating within safety levels without jeopardizing our future; by adding pressure to any of the limits, we enter the red circle, or the “uncertainty area”. In this red area we start reaching a point of environmental instability (e.g. more extreme weather for climate change). Passing this circle we enter the DANGER ZONE!

Decline in the shrimp catch in the Gulf’s of Mexico “dead zone” due to fertilizes reaching the water. -Nitrogen and Phosphorus flows boundary

Baltic Sea eutrophication. -Nitrogen and Phosphorus flows boundary

More than 40% of the global river discharge is now intercepted by large dams. -Biodiversity loss boundary

More than 1,500 amphibians, 1,200 birds, and 1,000 mammals among others, are threatened to be extinct. -Biodiversity loss boundary

It’s quite interesting to understand the complexity of these boundaries based on their interconnected relationship. For example, more carbon dioxide leads to global warming and ocean acidification, leading to higher temperatures and melting polar ice-sheets, acid and warmer oceans that destroy coral reefs, food and shelter for many fishes… and well, I could continue with the chain but you’ll be probably gone by then 😀

Found it interesting? Remember that everything we do has positive or negative consequences to the way we thrive.Want to know more about the limits and how they are quantified? Click here and don’t forget to leave your comments and questions!

Remember, climate change is not the only boundary we should be worry about!